Former Williamsburg man gets five years for stealing more than $500,000

Former Williamsburg resident once helped to lead a Virginia Beach granite company

NORFOLK — A former Williamsburg business executive was sentenced in federal court Monday to five years in prison for stealing more than $500,000 from the Virginia Beach tile and granite company he once helped lead.

Iraj "Roger" Ahmadian, 54, was a former executive vice president and day-to-day operations manager at Dillon Stone Corp., which sells marble and granite tile to business and residential customers.

He was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Jerome B. Friedman in Norfolk. Aside from the prison time, Friedman ordered him to pay back $508,000, and ordered him to three years of supervised release.

Ahmadian — who lived in Williamsburg at the time of the fraud but more recently lived in Tennessee — faced up to 35 years behind bars.

Ahmadian pleaded guilty in August to one count of bank fraud and one count of income tax evasion, with 16 additional bank fraud charges and two income tax charges dropped under a plea agreement.

According to court documents, Ahmadian was once in charge of approving payments to Dillon Stone's subcontractors.

Under the normal procedure, he'd submit pay requests to the company's accounting department, then give the issued checks to subcontractors directly.

But between February 2004 and January 2007, Ahmadian allegedly submitted 200 fraudulent pay requests to Dillon Stone — amounting to $578,999, a federal indictment said. He would tell people the requests were made by Dillon Stone's legitimate subcontractors

Then, once Ahmadian got the checks, he would forge the subcontractors' endorsements and deposit the payments into two Tennessee companies he owned. He then used the money for "his mortgage, medical expenses, travel, and making payments to his wife and others," the indictment stated.

The companies in his name were fraudulently created, using the same taxpayer identification number.

To avoid detection, Ahmadian "caused the (payment) requests to be spread out over several years, over multiple construction projects in various states," the indictment stated. A list of 17 checks in the indictment shows that many of them were for less than $5,000, and only one was higher than $10,000.

Ahmadian didn't file individual or corporate income tax returns for the years 2004 through 2006, with a tax liability of more than $200,000, according to court documents.